‘Northern Gateway Will Never Happen’: Oil Spill Consultant
Activists cheered Trudeau’s tanker ban Friday for ‘effectively stopping the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.’ Photo by Jackie Dives.
Trudeau-ordered ban on north coast oil tankers expected to kill Enbridge pipeline.
Conservationists are heralding the federal government’s decision to ban crude oil tanker traffic along British Columbia’s north coast as the death knell for the proposed Enbridge oil pipeline.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivered instructions Friday to the ministers of transport, fisheries, natural resources and environment to formalize a moratorium that experts say will block the controversial Northern Gateway project from continuing.
A ban would prevent hundreds of tankers each year from carrying diluted bitumen extracted from Alberta’s oil sands and piped up to northern B.C. from being shipped for export overseas.
”It will mean that Northern Gateway will never happen,” said Gerald Graham, a Victoria consultant specializing in oil spills for more than 40 years.
He said it remains to be seen what oil and gas activities will be permitted and which communities could be affected.
”It’s one thing to say what can’t take place, but another to say what will be allowed.”
The moratorium makes official a non-binding motion the House of Commons passed in 2010. It would put the Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound off limits to tanker traffic in the government’s bid to protect ecologically sensitive areas.
The policy’s roots date back more than four decades to Trudeau’s father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who worked with a British Columbia MP to pass an original ban involving the coastal waters north of Vancouver Island.
”I celebrated 44 years ago and I may be celebrating again. It’s basically an echo,” said David Anderson, who chaired the government’s environmental committee in 1972 and later became Liberal environment minister.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
